$30 NZD for un-metered 100Mbit/10Mbit is so cheap, do the carriers offer the Internet connection as a loss leader to make money of selling other services?

I don't think they loose money as part of the bigger picture. The fiber is a long-term investment and supports also the mobile infrastructure (the carriers here invest about 800-900 mnzd annually to their infrastructure), and even if some customers are on the red the total customer base will be on the black. The coverage is market driven, a single rural house -- most likely not available. A densely built, relatively new housing area or an apartment house? Most likely available. Small towns also install fiber with their local "we can do it" mentality.

I just did a lookup for an address where I know this carrier has fiber deployed. At this random address the 10/10 fiber connection is as a basic deal the housing area has with the carrier, no additional cost to the house owner. An upgrade to 100/10 will cost just 9.98e/month (less than 16 NZD/month).

There is an entertainment option for 19.90e/month (31.50 nzd/month) that includes the 100/10 access plus IPTV with 3000 hour of recording space in the cloud, rental videos, options for pay-tv and the rest.

Another address, without the deal, the prices would be 19 e/month for 10/10, 29 e/month for 100/10 (46 nzd/month), and 39.90 e/month for the entertainment package. No doubt if you buy the 100/10 access you'll soon receive a special offer the entertainment package.

For example OH's parents who moved to the new building didn't have any other option but the fiber as the carrier had not installed any copper. Want voice? Buy a mobile phone.

So yes, there is the incentive to try to get people upgrade to the IPTV offerings to increase ARPU. That's even the case with DSL -- my local DSL carrier sells standard full-rate ADSL2+ for 29.90e/month but there's the IPTV package for 39.90e/month that includes the full-rate ADSL2+ plus IPTV with pay-channels, 5 terabytes of PVR recording space, options for karaoke, F1, sport events, video rentals, etc.

The development has been driven by both the need to increase revenue but also to compete against the cable-TV that can offer internet access for speeds up to 200/10. Even if the DSL carrier has managed to streamline the installation times to a few days, the cable-TV can still beat them with instant activation.

There's also the marketing aspect. If we had capped internet, what can the carrier offer? "You've got now full-rate ADSL with 5 gigabytes of traffic, why not upgrade to 10 gigabytes?" "Eh, but I only use 4 gigabytes a month" compared to "You've got now a full-rate ADSL2, how about an upgrade to double speed ADSL2+ for just 5 nzd/month extra and we'll give you the first 6 months for free. How about that?"

That one goes both ways, and in my opinion once you get above about 10Mbps people value the extra datacap much more than the extra bandwidth

let me turn around your little hypothetical conversation:

"You've now got full rate ADSL2+ 20Mbps. Would you like to upgrade to VDSL 50Mbps for an extra $10/month?" "Eh, but I only surf the web, watch HD youtube, read email, Skype, none of which uses more than 3-4Mbps anyway. Why on earth would I want to bother with 50Mbps?"

compared to "You have 10GB of data per month, want to upgrade to 20GB for just $5/month with the first 6 months free?" "Yes please, I hit my cap about halfway through the month so upgrading would be sweet!"

NonprayingMantis: That one goes both ways, and in my opinion once you get above about 10Mbps people value the extra datacap much more than the extra bandwidth

Probably true, and true from the experience with our data capped customers in the 90's. I didn't use mobile broadband before the data caps disappeared -- a move that has increased the mobile broadband subscriptions from 100-150.000 to the current 3.6 million or so (Dec 2011).

I simply try to stay away from anything capped because I don't want to think how much bandwidth I'm using. I don't waste it but I don't want start thinking if this is "worth it" or how much X is using bandwidth.

"You've now got full rate ADSL2+ 20Mbps. Would you like to upgrade to VDSL 50Mbps for an extra $10/month?" "Eh, but I only surf the web, watch HD youtube, read email, Skype, none of which uses more than 3-4Mbps anyway. Why on earth would I want to bother with 50Mbps?"

compared to "You have 10GB of data per month, want to upgrade to 20GB for just $5/month with the first 6 months free?" "Yes please, I hit my cap about halfway through the month so upgrading would be sweet!"

Agreed, although the starting point -- an internet subscription that is capped well below your basic needs -- is a pretty bad one. A bit like feeding the hungry one with one slice of bread instead of a full bread.

As long as NZ has the data caps, especially at the low levels they are now, high-speed internet won't be much use. A good step forward would be making domestic traffic unlimited to fuel the growth of national content and services, IPTV to add value to the Internet pipe, etc.

Just for comparison, the traffix through the IX'es here peaks above 35 Gbit/s but the big ISP's all have private peerings around the country, not going through the IX. The broadband traffic through the 3G/LTE networks was 35000 TB for 2H2011, growing at rate of 1500 TB a month.

Back in the 90's I used to think that 512 kbit/s is enough for all needs (mid 90's as an ISP we gave all our employees a free leased line connection if they were next to our PoP, we just rent the copper from the telco and installed our own baseband modems and a small cisco cpe). A lot has changed since then, of course. Today I think that 5-10 Mbit/s is fine for mobile and when we move to a new home, 100+ Mbit/s broadband is one of the requirements (or the place has to be really special otherwise).

The leading cable TV operator just announced new data rates for their cable TV internet services, available immediately.

The new top-end service is 350/20 (350 Mbit/s download, 20 Mbit/s upload) while the other tiers are 200/15, 110/10, 40/8 and 10/2. For the other tiers they kept the old price but added upstream speed.

The new 350/20 costs 70 e/month (118 nzd), 200/15 is 55 e/month and the most popular subscription is the 40/8 for 35 e/month. The subscriptions are uncapped and have a satisfaction guarantee, with or without a 24 month contract (the latter gives you free modem, virus protection and stuff like that -- but you can also purchase your own EuroDOCSIS 3.0 modem if you wish).

The operator has tested channel bundling technology up to 1.6 Gbit/s in their cable TV network successfully so even faster speeds may become available. Their cable TV network is 90% fiber, 10% coax -- typically within the buildings or residential single home blocks.

What is kind of interesting is the market progress;

In 2008 the cable TV operator announced their 110M service. In 2009 they announced the 200M service.

As both are substantially faster than your average DSL offering, this made the traditional telcos increase their fiber deployment.

Now that 100/100 fiber available (not everywhere but no longer a rarity), the cable TV had to strike back.

Interesting to see if 250 and even faster fiber services will be announced next (pilots have already happened for 250M and 1G).

This operator covers almost 25% of the households in the country so their services are important to the competition.

I saw this http://www.radionz.co.nz/misc/eoi on the NZNOG mailing list this morning.

Last year here the national broadcasting company had a tender for their Internet access as well. It had optional cloud storage & co stuff (looked like they wanted to compare to Amazon EC2/S3) but for the bit transport they asked for 2 x 10G for content and 2 x 10G for other use, plus redundancy and the usual bits and pieces. GB, 95% or flat rate with multiple ceilings pricing.

As unfair comparison as possible as it totally depends what the company is offering to the interweb.

I saw this http://www.radionz.co.nz/misc/eoi on the NZNOG mailing list this morning.

Last year here the national broadcasting company had a tender for their Internet access as well. It had optional cloud storage & co stuff (looked like they wanted to compare to Amazon EC2/S3) but for the bit transport they asked for 2 x 10G for content and 2 x 10G for other use, plus redundancy and the usual bits and pieces. GB, 95% or flat rate with multiple ceilings pricing.

As unfair comparison as possible as it totally depends what the company is offering to the interweb.

Sorry did I read it wrong RNZ are asking for 1Gb/s not 10Gb/s, which is not unreasonable considering they get 20-50x demand during national crisis periods.

Yep.. the GE access link makes sense for RNZ, even without the peak demands GE would make more sense than 100M for 30-60M averages. Very little different in provisioning cost, 10GE is a bit more expensive. At work sites are frequently upgraded from 100M to GE if one notices that a site still has only 100M, it's easy and doesn't cost anything (we have purchased or rent plenty of dark fiber around the city, passive DWDM when needed).

People are enjoying the summer holidays (July is our holiday month unlike August in southern Europe) and one of the trends for this summer has been the good broadband to people's summer houses and on the road in general.

Some 2500-3500 new or upgraded 900 Mhz 3G base stations have been / will be installed this year alone, taking capacity away from the old GSM network and giving rural people decent HSDPA 3.5G broadband.

We went to visit gf's parents in the countryside a few weekends ago and while she was driving 140 km/h on the motorway, I had my iPad 3 as a Personal Hotspot and shared the 3G connection to my Macbook Air. Bit like having WiFi on the airplane, makes time fly faster. Too bad Speedtest doesn't show the velocity of the connection :)

Meanwhile in the city equivalent of Christchurch, people are mad at the local carrier for their fiber offerings.

Last summer they offered fiber installation to the residents for 900€ (1370 nzd) -- "half the normal price" and the offer was just for two weeks. This summer they offered the fiber for 0€ and by mistake sent the same offer to people who already got fiber last summer.

The Consumer Agency says that the carrier is entitled to changing their offerings.

Some folks have upgraded their cable internet connections to the new 350/20 and seem to be quite happy about it:

The fiber folks don't seem to rush to go above 100/100.

As it's the quarterly financial announcement month, the carriers have been giving their results this week.

Overall the revenues and profit are growing a little bit, churn rate is going down, the number of new subscriptions is still strong (may hit 10 million subscriptions by end of the year, in a country of 5.5 million people, pre-paid is marginal) and the mobile ARPU is on slight decrease -- mostly due to the decreasing payments between carriers.

One interesting note from the results, though -- the carriers are killing subvented phones and this is increasing their profit margins. Very few phones are subvented and the carriers see that users are not keen to be stuck with the same phone for 24 months. About two million phones are sold annually, so almost half of the population doesn't keep their phones for more than 12 months. Instead the carriers are offering phones at 0% interest rate, paid monthly for the next 12-24-36 months. The phones are unlocked and the users are free to sell them and/or shorten the payment schedule.

Want the new Galaxy S III? Pay 594€, 24.75 €/month for 24 months, or 49.50 €/months for 12 months (both are exactly the same 594 €). Add your favourite subscription if you want to, with the voice/text/data you like the best.

Looking at the numbers, one of the large carriers (Elisa) will have 2012 revenue of about 1.7 billion euros (2.6 billion nzd), profit 300m€ (460m nzd), and they invest about 12% of their revenue into the network. TeliaSonera is the other similar sized carrier but their numbers are harder to digest as they operate worldwide and are in the top 10 of telecom companies (Telia is of Swedish origin, Sonera is of finnish origin).

PS. I'm still stuck with my ADSL2+ and my residency permit to arrive to New Zealand will expire in 12 months.

The party is connected to the world with dual 10GE connection, pushing several gigabits/s of nerdy traffic in and out through the weekend.

(Unfortunately it's true what they say -- Speedtest doesn't work too well with fast connections :-)

I received my Nexus 7 a few days ago and we're heading to the archipelago for the weekend. I put my 4G SIM card to the USB stick, attached it to the TP-Link MR3020 and let's see how it performs as a 3G/4G WiFi HotSpot. I need to upgrade to MR3040 that has a battery but the MR3020 should be fine in the car and the house on the island has electricity as well. Planning to leave both the iPad and Macbook Air home and see how the Nexus does navigation, maps, and the usual interweb stuff.

ojala: People are enjoying the summer holidays (July is our holiday month unlike August in southern Europe) and one of the trends for this summer has been the good broadband to people's summer houses and on the road in general.

Some 2500-3500 new or upgraded 900 Mhz 3G base stations have been / will be installed this year alone, taking capacity away from the old GSM network and giving rural people decent HSDPA 3.5G broadband.

We went to visit gf's parents in the countryside a few weekends ago and while she was driving 140 km/h on the motorway, I had my iPad 3 as a Personal Hotspot and shared the 3G connection to my Macbook Air. Bit like having WiFi on the airplane, makes time fly faster. Too bad Speedtest doesn't show the velocity of the connection :)

Meanwhile in the city equivalent of Christchurch, people are mad at the local carrier for their fiber offerings.

Last summer they offered fiber installation to the residents for 900€ (1370 nzd) -- "half the normal price" and the offer was just for two weeks. This summer they offered the fiber for 0€ and by mistake sent the same offer to people who already got fiber last summer.

The Consumer Agency says that the carrier is entitled to changing their offerings.

Some folks have upgraded their cable internet connections to the new 350/20 and seem to be quite happy about it:

The fiber folks don't seem to rush to go above 100/100.

As it's the quarterly financial announcement month, the carriers have been giving their results this week.

Overall the revenues and profit are growing a little bit, churn rate is going down, the number of new subscriptions is still strong (may hit 10 million subscriptions by end of the year, in a country of 5.5 million people, pre-paid is marginal) and the mobile ARPU is on slight decrease -- mostly due to the decreasing payments between carriers.

One interesting note from the results, though -- the carriers are killing subvented phones and this is increasing their profit margins. Very few phones are subvented and the carriers see that users are not keen to be stuck with the same phone for 24 months. About two million phones are sold annually, so almost half of the population doesn't keep their phones for more than 12 months. Instead the carriers are offering phones at 0% interest rate, paid monthly for the next 12-24-36 months. The phones are unlocked and the users are free to sell them and/or shorten the payment schedule.

Want the new Galaxy S III? Pay 594€, 24.75 €/month for 24 months, or 49.50 €/months for 12 months (both are exactly the same 594 €). Add your favourite subscription if you want to, with the voice/text/data you like the best.

Looking at the numbers, one of the large carriers (Elisa) will have 2012 revenue of about 1.7 billion euros (2.6 billion nzd), profit 300m€ (460m nzd), and they invest about 12% of their revenue into the network. TeliaSonera is the other similar sized carrier but their numbers are harder to digest as they operate worldwide and are in the top 10 of telecom companies (Telia is of Swedish origin, Sonera is of finnish origin).

PS. I'm still stuck with my ADSL2+ and my residency permit to arrive to New Zealand will expire in 12 months.

It's worth pointing out that the speedtest that shows 8.9Mbps also shows that this is still faster than 71% of Finland.

It's worth pointing out that the speedtest that shows 8.9Mbps also shows that this is still faster than 71% of Finland.

So it's not like fibre is everywhere.

True (I'm a living example :-) but the two are not related. As we don't have wired or wireless(* data caps, the access services are offered at different speeds. We don't really see a generic trend of people upgrading to faster speeds but a division to mobile broadband and fixed broadband. *) not 100% true

Mobile broadband is growing really fast and fixed broadband is loosing momentum at the lower speeds and growing at the higher speeds. Ordinary people with basic needs move to mobile broadband and others upgrade to higher speeds, away from DSL. This is exactly why I like what Telstra is doing in Australia -- concentrating on fiber and wireless, dropping the copper -- as it's exactly the same what is happening here. In the telco market two numbers are decreasing -- number of fixed phone subscriptions (a lot) and number of DSL subscriptions (a little).

5.4 million people. 1.6 million fixed broadband. 1 million fixed phones. 9+ mobile subscriptions. The number of mobile broadband subscriptions is becoming irrelevant, last year alone the mobile broadband traffic grew 84% to 62000 Tb.

Looking at the regulator's statistics for fixed broadband, 2009-2010-2011 percentage for 10-25M (=full-rate adsl2+) has been 14-26-32%. 25-99M (=mostly cable) 1-3-4% and 100M- (=fiber) 2-4-6%. DSL peaked in 2007. I'm actually keen to see the 2012 numbers as so much change in the trends is going on right now.

As long as Speedtest doesn't differentiate mobile and fixed broadband, it's actually amazing that the average data rate is that high or growing at all. And if you think about it, there are two common usage for Speedtest in 2012: if you've got really high speed connection or if you want to check the mobile broadband speed at your current location.

I like Sweden's Bredbandskollen, http://www.bredbandskollen.se/statistik/ as it has been optimized for the local network infrastructure to be as realistic as possible and you can divide the data into geographical areas, carriers and type of connection. The amount of tests run also gives a ballpark how reliable the numbers are (=and proves my point when speedtests are typically run :-).

The NZ model has an advantage though as everyone has the highest available data rate but with data caps. IF the data caps will eventually be gone, the data rates are high for everyone -- assuming that the overall access technologies are up to date.

Should get busier towards the weekend. Organizers message is simply that "there's room for more traffic -- the network doesn't break by usage."

Which the folks did.

On saturday the wireless network peaked with 770 devices and the link to the interweb peaked at 2.4 Gbit/s in, 4.4 Gbit/s out. A large portion of the outgoing traffic was from the up to 1000 simultaneous viewers who watched the AssemblyTV broadcast. During the event the folks broadcast programming on the local cable TV network (in SD) and the broadcast is available through the in various formats, from 512 kbit/s "mobile stream" up to 8 Mbit/s HD stream.

I'm not involved with the event but I think it's a great event from every perspective. The participants have great time with their hobby and meet new friends and companies that may one day employ them, it's a great forum to show your programming skills and no doubt one of the reasons why the gaming industry has been so successful around here -- the folks who started Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, won a mobile game competition at Assembly hack in 2003. The volunteers get experience doing things at slightly bigger scale, and the companies that give support, loan hardware and do other things get plenty of goodwill and name among the professionals.